598 margaret l. king
roman overreaching was not a patrician humanist but the commoner
Paolo Sarpi (1552–1626).^ This Servite friar, a habitué of the patrician salon
hosted by the Morosinis, deconstructed papal claims in a series of works,
in the sum a devastating critique supported by a masterful grasp of eccle-
siastical history—later also demonstrated in his history of the council
of Trent (first published in london, 1619, its patron none less than King
James i).89 reflecting the political interests of the giovani faction of Vene-
tian nobles and embodying various streams of heretical and anticlerical
thought, Sarpi addressed himself to a european audience. in Sarpi termi-
nate many of the disparate strands of Venetian intellectual culture as it
shifted from the renaissance to the Baroque era.
Sarpi’s magnificent witness to the repressions of an established church
would echo in the Protestant north and down to the enlightenment. But
after the early 1600s, no other lions roamed in Venice to give free utter-
ance to their dissent—except on the stage, where lions strode still, and
opera and drama continued to comment on the life of the city—until the
city, as a free republic, was no more.90
The Worth of WomenThe vibrant settings of cultural exchange that prevailed in 16th-century
Venice uniquely afforded an opportunity for women to give expression to
feelings and perceptions they must long have harbored but were barred
from mentioning. now more interested in publishing vernacular works
of general interest for mass audiences than classical fare for the few, the
presses of Venice hungrily acquired the manuscripts of women authors,
including those of the foreigners Vittoria colonna and Tullia d’aragona, as
89 in Paolo Sarpi, Opere, ed. Gaetano cozzi and luisa cozzi (Milan/naples, 1969), 721–
1016.
90 For opera in Venice, see Beth l. Glixon and Jonathan e. Glixon, Inventing the Business
of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (oxford, 2006);
Wendy B. heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century
Venice (Berkeley, 2003); Muir, Culture Wars; and ellen rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century
Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991). See also the special issue of the Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, 36.3 (2006), 331–417, offering an extrended colloquy on opera in
17th-century Venice with contributions by edward Muir, Mauro calcagno, Wendy B. heller,
dennis romano, and ellen rosand; and the complex exploration of the relations between
performance and time in Venetian culture by eleanor Selfridge-Field, Song and Season:
Science, Culture, and Theatrical Time in Early Modern Venice (Stanford, 2007).